Method for transferring files to old floppies
 

Is there a method for transferring downloaded files to 5 1/4 floppy disk?

The easy answer: no.
While the 3.5" floppy drive lived long enough to get a version with a USB interface, 5.25" did not and because the idea of having a 5.25" floppy drive that you just plugged into a computer with a USB cable and it appeared in My Computer like it always did back in the day was apparently only seriously looked into within the last year there is no easy solution because there is no sort of USB to floppy interface or device driver that exists that "just works" like it does with the 3.5" drives. They (generic USB to floppy adapters) are all hard-coded with the expectation you are going to use a 3.5" floppy drive and nothing else, because why would you? I seriously have no goddamn idea how we went so long and the best anyone has ever developed to solve this problem is a read-only device. It's absolutely infuriating. Instead we ended up with a pile of USB floppy controllers that can read and write at the flux-level (the raw magnetic flux transitions on the disk rather than assume any one filesystem) that each have their own way of creating and reading disk images, doesn't "just work" in Windows like you would expect and cost a ton of money because they go way beyond just reading and writing a floppy disk in Windows like you've been able to since Windows itself was created.

[smokes cigarette to calm down]

So your "practical" option on a modern computer is one of these flux-level adapters that either require linux or rely entirely on the command line to operate. The "sensible" option is a completely separate computer old enough to have areal onboard floppy controller and a network adapter.

How old are we talking? I have older pcs but not sure if old enough. I have a 486, a pII and a couple others.

Most motherboard manufacturers began restricting the onboard floppy controller from two floppy drives to 1 around the Pentium 4/Athlon era. I have seen motherboards with a floppy interface as late as the LGA775 core2 era but by then it was only on low-end or commercial/industrial application motherboards.
Anything older than that like your mentioned PII and 486 will work just fine.

Windows 10 will still work with a 5.25" floppy drive natively, but only if it's a real floppy controller, detected by the BIOS and early versions of EFI.

Ok. So windows 98 or xp too? I have both of those as well

Those are both fine.

�� great. What term do I type in search? Name of device etc.

I have a Kryoflux USB flux level floppy controller in an enclosure with a 3 1/2" and a 5 1/4" drive. I've read lots of IBM disks with it and read/wrote some Commodore disks with it too. I think it works in windows, it uses Java Runtime I think and has a GUI but I don't remember if you can write disks with the GUI.

Being a flux level controller it's good at recovering damaged disks.:thmbsp:

Imma have to get one. Sounds good.

Is the one I need on here?
https://webstore.kryoflux.com/catalog/